


Forty-Two Steps

by titania522



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Catching Fire, Comfort, Fluff, everlark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:35:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1659989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/titania522/pseuds/titania522
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katniss is still recovering from her wound after falling from a tree near the electrified fence.  She is confined to bed rest by her mother.  Katniss and Peeta establish a routine of working on Katniss’ family book of plants.  He then carries her down the stairs each day for a change of scenery and takes her back upstairs at the end of each day.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forty-Two Steps

**Author's Note:**

> Bookpeetatbh requested a drabble set during the period between the Victory Tour and the Reaping for the Quarter Quell.

 

Even when she has not been to the woods in days, Katniss still smells like pine wood and forest mist.  I will never be able to separate the scent of her from warm, musky spring days.  The smell of fresh leaves and tree bark wafts from her hair like a vibrant cloud of earthly perfume, a more compelling aroma than any I had ever experienced in the Capitol.

This is our routine and ours alone.

I come each morning bearing a fresh loaf of bread or a basket of buns, sometimes both and am usually asked to stay for breakfast by Mrs. Everdeen.  As I eat, she arranges the buns in an empty spot on the tray reserved only for them and carries it to Katniss, who is usually already awake.  They tarry a bit as her mother helps her prepare for the day.  It is then that my attention becomes fixated on the stairs.  They wait in silent expectation, as I do for Mrs. Everdeen to return to announce that Katniss is ready to receive me.  I am counting the moments until she descends to the bottom of the stairs and grants me access to her daughter.   

I walk carefully up those stairs, always mindful of the prosthetic that stands in for my real leg and knock on the door, waiting for her rough, sultry voice to bid me to enter.  There is the small talk, the banal exchange and then there is her. My arm curls under her knees, the loose hairs of her braided hair tickling my chin as her head rests against my shoulder, fitting there as if she had been carved from the spot at some point in the ancient history of the universe, when that which was once whole was violently forced apart and compelled to spend the rest of eternity seeking the missing half.   Her arms were like the forest vines, winding about my neck and clinging gently but firmly.  For those precious moments, she is mine, without equivocation, her habitual instinct to flee suppressed by her wound or perhaps it is her weakness that allows her to surrender her pride and melt into my arms.

She is close enough to me that I glimpse the crystal-shaped flecks of light in her grey eyes.  She will invariably drop them when I glance at her but those slivers of moonlight come to settle on my face the moment I shift my focus to descending those stairs.  I am not sure what it is that captures her attention but I am torn between a greedy need to take in every last mark and pore on her skin and the equal satisfaction of basking in her surreptitious attention.

Day after day, I know I do not imagine the small sigh that escapes her lips each time she sinks against me, releasing something pent up into the air.  Here there is no arena, no bow and arrows, no hunting, no Gale, no ambivalence, just her thin, firm body against mine as I count the steps from her room to the couch – all forty-two steps.

Forty-two steps where I don’t have to share her with anyone.

Forty-two steps are the interval between two parentheses outside of which I am just Peeta – baker, tribute, friend, ally, erstwhile fiancée.

Forty-two steps are the space within which I alone protect her from gravity itself and she accepts it, even revels in it.  I more than sense her surrender.

Forty-two steps where she is not evading, suppressing or shielding anything.  She needs me and does not shy away from her vulnerability.

Forty-two steps in which she is unequivocally, incandescently mine.

Forty-two steps in which she allows me to belong to her too.


End file.
